Sketchbook: waiting rooms

I have spent seemingly endless hours in waiting rooms while I've been on this island; long, tedious hours in dull, tedious rooms. I decided to start keeping some notes and sketches, goodness knows I had the time to make them. I tried to see the charm and simplicity in a mass produced chair in a nondescript room. Here are two such examples.

Sketchbook: Smith's Cove

After a lovely chilled out birthday day, Jem and I spent the afternoon at Smith's cove, sketching the jumpers. Smith's Cove is a public beach and is most often used as the backdrop for beach weddings and snorkelers, since it has a reef just metres from the beach.

Cressi fins to the rescue

Last week I was heartbroken to discover that one of my fins had broken, a clean crack across my left fin, rendered it completely useless. I felt like Nemo, with his lucky-fin! What was most upsetting is that my fins and snorkel mask were a leaving present from Digit and I had no receipt.

Nurse Leila's House

Welcome to Nurse Leila's House, a picturesque lilac and turquoise building which has captured my heart, as soon as I saw it with its picket fence and vivid almond tree I wanted to paint it. Although far from my favourite painting, here's my first offering, I'm sure there will be more.

Nurse Leila's House is owned by The National Trust, and currently being cared for by Cayman Traditional Arts (CTA), and I've been helping out CTA a few days a week. So this delightful place could be my prospective new office!

Cayman Bakery doubles its order

The Bowerbird Cayman Bakery continues to go from strength to strength. I'm playing about with the recipe more, and the rolls seem to be getting bigger for it. These wholemeal rolls are now a staple in the PT/MCB household so we've doubled our batch size.

Today's my day off, so it's a full day of catching up with all the fun things.

Painting: Miss Charlene

Here's a painting of a lady I met at CTA (Cayman Traditional Arts), she is a thatch and weave demonstrator, here she is, in Nurse Leila's garden, West Bay.

Mixed media on paper

sketchbook: urchin

Inspired by my near spiking from a black sea urchin this morning, I collected up some sea urchin shells for sketching this afternoon. They're incredibly delicate under all those spikes, see photos on Flickr.

Observations on a small island #3

Here are some patterned coralloid stones I've been photographing. The brain-patterned heart is my favourite so far, we discovered these last weekend on our Rum Point wanderings. We also found this sheet of dried out coral on the beach, I imagine it was far more beautiful underwater, but it's intricacy is still very fetching.

Soundbite: missing appendages

I think I was as surprised as the person to whom this question was posed. While queuing in the Department of Licensing, this chap had filled his form out incorrectly, I presume. It's not the sort of question you hear everyday delivered with such boredom too.

Sketchbook: Immigration

In an effort to pass the time and document my waiting time, yes it does say 2:28min here's my banal doodle.

Soundbite: the way it has

I may have lost 4 hours of my life waiting in Immigration in the last two days, but I have garnered some interesting advice.

Sketchbook: beach people 2

More people watching on Seven Mile Beach.

Soundbite: darndest accent

While talking to American guests at the Ritz-Carlton, gosh darned it.

Introducing Pajero

Here's our new toy, the nippy and cute Pajero, here more specifically is PT trying to leave me behind on a deserted beach, the scamp. Look at his cheeky face!

We took the jeep to stretch its legs on a trip to Rum Point, it's the furthest destination on the island and took us about an hour to get to, and it was a beautiful Caribbean idyll, see them on Flickr.